Watch Jeffery Marino, Director, Office of Data and Innovation, State of California, share how California is using digital tools and AI to help residents discuss complex issues.

When California launched Engaged California, our first-in-the-nation deliberative democracy program, we set out with one goal: to foster meaningful dialogue and strengthen trust between Californians and their government. 

The January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles left deep physical and emotional scars in our communities, and traditional town halls or surveys were not sufficient to capture the scale and nuance of what communities needed to recover. 

The Office of Data and Innovation, supported by the Newsom Administration and the Government Operations Agency, knew that if public leaders were going to act quickly and effectively, the process had to begin with a rigorous, community-driven research approach.

What followed was a six-month digital conversation that produced an aligned action plan shaped directly by fire survivors. This action plan was supported by human-centered design, advanced analytics, partnerships with subject matter experts, and continuous feedback loops with survivors.

Starting With Community-Defined Priorities

Instead of starting with a predefined list of recovery issues, we asked survivors to set the agenda themselves. Participants evaluated the importance of ten disaster related topics, creating the foundation for the entire engagement.

The engagement included two phases:

1. Phase 1: Agenda setting to identify the most-pressing issues and surface key themes, where survivors submitted more than 1,200 comments that were synthesized into 19 policy actions.

2. Phase 2: Deliberation and prioritization, where participants discussed, ranked, voted, and refined those actions into a clear set of top community needs.

This structure ensured that communities were driving decision-making rather than being passengers in the process.

Using Technology to Listen at Scale

To make sense of thousands of comments and realtime participation, we needed a platform capable of large scale reach and rapid insight generation. Engaged California used tools that supported:

• Anonymous participation

• Multi-criteria decision making

• Data visualization to help participants see emerging perspectives in real time

This created a “town hall for the digital age,” where survivors could comment, respond, and see how their perspectives aligned with others. The platform used advanced non-linear optimization techniques to surface and update potential decision outcomes as participation grew. Traditional listening methods can require months of manual coding information gathered through different mediums. This digital approach allowed us to understand community sentiment at scale and at speed.

Collecting Data Through Broad, Multichannel Outreach

Reaching survivors during an ongoing recovery effort required more than simply launching a website. Our research outreach strategy incorporated paid media, social media, direct email, local radio, partner organizations, and in-person events. We built a focused communications and marketing campaign to ensure those most affected knew they were invited to participate, from Facebook and Instagram to KBLA radio and community-based organizations. Even posters with QR codes were used.

In total, more than 3,000 residents were invited into the platform, contributing over 2,500 comments and casting nearly 4,000 votes during the deliberation phase. The breadth of participation allowed our research team to surface diverse lived experiences while identifying consistent patterns across geographically distinct fire zones.

Turning Data Into Actionable Insights

From thousands of data points, survivors consistently converged on five priorities that told a unified story about what rebuilding should look like: upgrades to utilities infrastructure and safety, improving water systems, stronger emergency notifications and alerts, financial support programs, and streamlined permitting.

To arrive at these insights, we relied on a hybrid analysis model:

• AI-assisted analysis to help organize and cluster comments around themes.

• Human moderation and qualitative review to ensure compliance with participation guidelines and accuracy with data analysis and synthesis.

• Participant voting and ranking quantified support and tradeoffs.

This combination allowed us to translate meaningful personal narratives into a data-driven action plan for government leaders to deliver on.

Responding to Community Needs

In the final stage of the engagement, ODI worked with state, county, city, and utility partners to communicate findings and ensure that community priorities informed current and upcoming recovery operations. This validation helped bridge survivors’ needs with government action in both the short and long term.

The result was a set of actions that government officials have already begun implementing, from undergrounding relevant power lines and assessing water system upgrades to securing billions in federal assistance and accelerating permit review timelines.

Lessons for Public-Sector Leaders

Three insights emerged from this pilot that will guide future engagements:

1. Community-driven research produces more durable solutions. Residents were not passive respondents—they shaped the problem definition and the solutions.

2. Technology accelerates insight, but does not replace human judgment. Analyzing thousands of comments in weeks rather than months allowed government to move at the pace of community need while maintaining rigor and oversight.

3. Transparency strengthens trust. Participants could see consensus forming in real time, and agencies could see exactly how recommendations emerged.

A Model for Future Engagements

The LA Fires engagement was only the beginning. Its research model, which is rapid, community-driven, and technologically supported, has since informed statewide conversations on government efficiency and will guide future engagements with complex policy challenges.

By listening at scale, synthesizing collaboratively, and validating with partners, we created not just an action plan for LA wildfire recovery, but a replicable model for a more inclusive and effective public sector.